Seek and Ye Shall Find
by The Crow of Battle
Summary: As the dividing line between the real and the virtual becomes more and more blurred, one cannot always be sure that one's nightmares are not the true reality.... Post QUARANTINE, possibly somewhat AU.


Disclaimer: .hack is not mine.

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_Seek and Ye Shall Find_

_Chapter 0000: Awakening_

_No -- no. Why am I still here? I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to -- I was supposed to wake up, wasn't I? With all the others. I was supposed to--_

_A silky-sweet voice slid out of the darkness, silencing the plaintive confusion. "Wake up to what, child? There's nothing left. Didn't I tell you?" The voice gave a soft, gentle, almost kindly laugh, clear and melodic in the still and frozen silence._

_"They pulled the plug. In your so-called real world, you, child, are dead..."_

With a gasp, the boy sat bolt upright, his heart pounding frantically in his ears. After a few seconds, the pace of the rhythmic thuddingslowed slightly as some details of his surroundings began to sink in: the dim light of the street, filtering in through the window shades; the electronic green glow of the clock by his bed; the quiet humming of the baseboard heating. All real, all reassuringly normal.

Well, almost normal; he paused, frowning in momentary distraction at the baseboard. _My parents actually turned the heat up? Wow. Hell must've frozen over. _His momentary amusement at the feeble humor faded quickly, however -- it had only arisen at all because it was desperate for something to laugh at. But the choice of clichés had been an unfortunate one -- he remembered hell very clearly. It _had _been freezing.

_And burning at the same time. Always thought that was a good trick, on her part. Also a very unfair one._

He sighed, scrubbing wearily at his forehead in an attempt to banish the familiar ache rising there. He supposed he ought to be getting used to the nightmares, by now -- two months home from the hospital and he hadn't yet had a decent night's sleep. _Get over it. They're bad dreams. That's _all.

But _Her _voice echoed through his mind, low and amused. _Don't be so sure, boy._

He shivered. Despite his parents' unprecedented surrender to the thermostat, even the heater's most valiant attempts would have been hard-pressed to combat the midwinter chill that had invaded his drafty bedroom, and his own mental state wasn't helping matters. The darkness, in turn, wasn't helping his mental state. Left to wander, his gaze was drawn inexorably to the digital clock on its stand; it was the brightest thing in the room, at present. He found himself staring at it almost hungrily, as if his eyes could devour the pitiful source of light and let it fill his head, driving away nightmares for all time. The darkness _there _hadn't been as bad as the cold, perhaps, but it had been bad enough.

Unfortunately, the illumination did very little other than to make the surrounding darkness all the darker by comparison. Eventually, making a face of resignation, he reached for his bedside lamp. After a few seconds' search his fingers found the switch, and he breathed a slightly shaky sigh of relief, slumping back to lean against the headboard of his bed, as warm and welcome light flooded the room.

Even the light wasn't entirely perfect, though. His gaze, momentarily free to wander once more, soon came to rest on the computer which sat, placid and unthreatening, on the desk opposite his bed.

He had an uncomfortable feeling that the monitor was staring back at him, and for a brief, unreasonable moment had to fight down the urge to throw a blanket over top of it. _Mo-om, make it stop looking at me... _Hah. Not quite the brand of monster generally thought to haunt children's bedrooms at night, he had to admit. Six-legged, hairy, sharp-fanged carnivores under the bed or in the closet might almost have been preferable, though. _They _at least were imaginary.

_As is this,_ the rational side of his mind muttered testily. _For crying out loud, get a grip, will you? The computer is not going to eat you. Go back to sleep. 'M tired._

He rejected this option instantly. In his present state of mind, sleep would certainly only mean more nightmares.

Turning the lamp off again was ruled out just as quickly. The remaining alternative was to continue to watch his computer warily, as if it might pounce at any moment. He couldn't seem to yank his eyes away from the thing for more than a second or two. He did manage a glance back to his clock, however. 12:52 AM, it read. The alarm was set for seven.

_Right. Six hours and eight minutes. That's... that's a long time for a staring contest with an inanimate object._

His parents had never quite fathomed the link between The World and their son's sudden collapse. There had, he gathered, been rumors in the press that the game had been somehow involved with several such cases, but his parents were sensible people and had dismissed the notion as impossible. That was probably for the best; he had no wish for them to know where his mind had been for the better part of the last year. They had already had enough to worry about. But it did mean that he had no plausible reason to ask them to take the computer out of his room. So he tiptoed around the thing every day, and turned it on for just long enough to check his mail and do his homework, and then hastily turned it off again. The Face-Mounted Display and the game controller, both of which went with The World, still sat on top of the CPU, where his mother had put them after he'd been rushed to the hospital. He would have put them away in the closet, but... that would have involved working up the nerve to touch them.

Besides, the trouble was -- he _missed _The World, when he allowed himself to admit it. It was someplace familiar. The real world wasn't particularly familiar, not anymore. He suspected She had messed with his mind -- or maybe hadn't needed to; maybe everything else She had done had been enough to make his mind mess, quite effectively, with itself. That seemed more likely.

In any case, upon waking in the hospital he had found that certain minor and unimportant details of his life pre-data drain -- oh, for instance, to pick an example entirely at random, his name -- had become less than crystal clear in his mind. He had rather assumed at the beginning that things would come back to him as time went on, and thus had elected not to mention the matter to anyone, but as it had been well over two months now he was beginning to suspect that the missing pieces were gone for good. Of course, if he told this to someone _now, _it would open the way for a why-on-earth-didn't-you-_SAY_-something conversation, for which he didn't really feel he had the energy... and so he continued to keep his mouth shut. He had always been good at picking up information, and though he did not seem to be as quick with words as he thought he once had been, he had nonetheless managed to bluff reasonably well so far.

But as time had gone on and his initial giddy relief at being free of _Her _clutches had begun to fade, he had come to suspect that he had probably been almost as lonely in real life as he had been when he was trapped in the game. Upon his return to school it had quickly become apparent that none of his classmates were particularly happy to see him again, and frankly, nor were most of his teachers. And his parents' perpetual air of awkward, worried guilt stirred vague remembrances that they had never really been around very much...

The World was another matter. He _remembered _The World. Granted, he would have paid dearly to forget most of the more recent bits, but the rest -- he remembered places which had been great fun to explore, and fights which he had almost always won, and people who... hadn't been his _friends,_ as such, he hadn't had any friends there, either, except for --

Well. He hadn't had any friends there, either. But he had known some quite interesting people, and if others hadn't liked him they had at least stayed out of his way, which was more than could be said about people in reality.

An odd, almost homesick twinge struck his stomach, and he had a sudden, sinking feeling that he was trying to talk himself into going back.

_And I have a sudden, worse feeling that I'm going to succeed. I mean, after all, I'm _me._ I can be very persuasive when I want to be._

_But--_

_What else are you... er... am I going to do, anyway? Can't go back to sleep. And there's nothing on the bookshelf that I haven't read a million times by now. _

_Look. What can actually go wrong? Everything's been taken care of now, right? She's not -- She's -- well, I'm not really sure what happened to Her, actually. But everybody woke up, and Kite -- he has everything under control, right?_

_No, no. Forget it. Uh-uh. Bad idea. _But as he shook his head stubbornly he caught another glimpse of the clock, out of the corner of his eye, and he paused.

_Six hours, three minutes until my alarm goes off. _His shoulders sagged. _Right._

And then, before he even realized he was moving, he found himself swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, standing up, padding over to the computer desk, hitting the on switch, sitting down...

He would log in, he told himself firmly, just for a minute or two. That was all. Just to prove he could. And then he would leave, and that would be the end of it, and the thing could stop nagging at him.

After a few seconds of faint humming and whirring, the familiar angular patterns of Altimit's standard wallpaper came into focus; he'd had one of The World, but had replaced it shortly after getting home from the hospital. It took him a moment of searching through menus to find his aim; he'd deleted the shortcut from his desktop, too. But at last the thing was located, and, trying to ignore his rising sense of unease, he clicked on it.

_Please enter your username and password in the fields below._

_Username: Sora_

_Password: xxxxxxxx_

_Information correct. Loading, please wait..._

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A/N: Well, there you have it -- the first chapter of my first .hack fic ever. Review? 


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